Rick Rubin interviews Trent Reznor

July 23, 2023 7:31 AM

Music Master Rick Rubin interviewed NIN creator Trent Reznor for his podcast Tetragrammaton. [2h10m, audio only] Nine Inch Nails is Rubin's favorite band. Reznor shares a lot, reflecting on his life and career from where he is now. It's a bit like Marc Maron only more about music and much more gentle.
posted by hippybear (26 comments total)

Trent Reznor mellowing into kind of a chill dude has brought me much enjoyment over the years.

Particularly enjoyed a recent photo of all past and present members of Nine Inch Nails in which everyone turned up wearing variety of black clothing except for Trent whose wearing an olive green jacket.
posted by Artw at 8:08 AM on July 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Justin Hawkins (formerly of The Darkness, now makes great YouTube videos on music) on why Head Like a Hole is so damn good.
posted by Artw at 8:11 AM on July 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

oooh one of my all time favorite bands!! its sunday, I think I can find 2 hours...
posted by supermedusa at 8:27 AM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm about 80 pages into Rubin's book The Creative Act: A Way Of Being. It is a refreshing read. I had never understood why Rubin's collaboration was so important to so many creative works.

I mean ... I've read that he can't play any instruments or even operate a mixing board.

But this book is not as focused as ... like Writing Down The Bones, but it is in an oblique way a superset of that book for being able to find what it means to make art. And now I understand why he is so important to creative processes to so many people.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 8:32 AM on July 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Particularly enjoyed a recent photo of all past and present members of Nine Inch Nails in which everyone turned up wearing variety of black clothing except for Trent whose wearing an olive green jacket.

That probably occurred before or after this September 23, 2022, interview that was conducted when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a great interview!
posted by ElKevbo at 9:30 AM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Minor typo corrected!
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 10:04 AM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

OMG, the account of teen Trent trying to get ANGRY SOUNDS out of a Wurlitzer.
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM on July 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Tangential to the interview but relevant to the link: I listened to this a while back and at 22:40 there is a macadamia nut commercial so fucking weird and goes on for (seemingly!) so fucking long that at first I assumed it was maybe a really deep-cut joke of some kind about Lost Highway, but in fact just appears to be a macadamia nut commercial more sinister and eerie than anything Trent has ever made (to date, anyway; we haven't heard the TMNT score yet).
posted by Lyn Never at 11:52 AM on July 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Both of the commercial breaks in this podcast are very retro in their styling, and they're also the only parts with a musical bed, so when you hit the commercial you can skip forward X seconds and if there's music playing you're still in the commercial.
posted by hippybear at 11:54 AM on July 23, 2023

I honestly thought it was going to be revealed to be some distant relative of Trent’s worked on it in the 50s or something.
posted by Artw at 11:55 AM on July 23, 2023

BTW I now have the podcast pauses while I put on some albums relating to it, which is a sign of quality.
posted by Artw at 11:56 AM on July 23, 2023

For some time now I’ve enjoyed selectively listening to the “Broken Record” podcast: only the episodes hosted by Rubin. Nothing against the other hosts—well, maybe Malcolm Gladwell—but there’s something about the way the guests relate to him as an equal and peer, often with a lot of shared history and mutual past collaborators, that makes these interviews much more appealing than the typical journalist/musician chat.
posted by staggernation at 12:34 PM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

For some time now I’ve enjoyed selectively listening to the “Broken Record” podcast: only the episodes hosted by Rubin.

Only the episodes hosted by Rubin and NOT with members of the RHCP (with an exception to Frusciante). Keidis has done enough talking for two lifetimes.
posted by alex_skazat at 2:34 PM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Rubin also did an interview recently with ECW founder & professional wrestling "wise man" Paul Heyman, because Rubin is a true fan of pro-wrestling and Heyman loves to expound on the thoughts behind it. The interview ran three hours, or about an hour longer than most of Rubin's podcast interviews.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:24 PM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I like RR but again, like with his other podcasts, 16 episodes with only one female guest.
posted by some chick at 5:01 PM on July 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

I found the RR + Eno interview to be pretty great and also Andre 3000. Very much looking forward to the upcoming episode with Andrew Hickey (of the Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast).
posted by brachiopod at 7:52 PM on July 23, 2023

That I’ll have to check.

Of course my fave celebrity Eno interview is Alan Moore interviews Brian Eno
posted by Artw at 8:50 PM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It took me forever to get a chance to listen to the whole thing, never having two contiguous, continuous hours of free time--but I am so glad I was able to hear this. Trent is so thoughtful, so introspective, so reflective about art, about his process, about what goes wrong and what drives him forward, that the whole thing was really a delight to listen to. Even though it only took like, what, 30 seconds, just hearing about how Ghosts I-IV came about was so enlightening, because I hadn't ever understood why it sounded so different than much of his other work, yet still definitely part of that NIN-continuum. The stuff about being honest as an artist--questioning who you really are, what you really want, how that factors into what you have to say--was so grounded, which is really different than a lot of talk about creativity, where it can all feel sorta self-helpy and therapy-y. It's really one of the best music interviews I've ever listened to.
posted by mittens at 1:43 PM on July 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

At the verrrry end of the interview was actually where it hit me the hardest. Trent lamenting that feeling that probably - given the MeFi demo - we've all experienced and did for years but haven't had in ... what, a decade or more : going to the record store and walking out with almost more than you could carry, so excited to get home and pour over the lyric sheets and liner notes and listen to every song as many times and finding new artists and ... and... ah, god, we'll never quite get that again, will we? Sure, we can listen to practically any song ever written in a matter of clicks, but it does take a lot of the importance and gravitas out of the whole thing.

(he didn't mention the SMELLLLLL though. Best album I ever smelled? The cassette tape liner notes / lyrics for Iron Maiden's Seventh Son of A Seventh Son, I suspect owing the sheer amount of ink that had to go into printing that massive tome)

That said, he makes a cryptic mention of "working on something in that arena" has me a little excited. While it might just be some web-exclusive online NIN museum (which, hey, bring it on!) or something more expansive, god I do miss that feeling.
posted by revmitcz at 9:28 PM on July 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I bet it's a children's book!
posted by mittens at 7:22 AM on July 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Trent Reznor mellowing into kind of a chill dude has brought me much enjoyment over the years.

In the late 90s, I made a joke that after buying every album, official single & ep, attending half a dozen concerts and spending too much on t-shirts that if Trent Reznor was still depressed it wasn't my fault. Then, for my 50th b-day last year I went to see them at a big outdoor festival and it was perfect. The week after he did all the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame stuff, and I realized, I really like the dude.

I cannot wait to spend a few hours with this.
posted by DigDoug at 7:29 AM on July 25, 2023

The cassette tape liner notes / lyrics for Iron Maiden's Seventh Son of A Seventh Son

nostalgia: engaged

I came to Maiden late ("Can I Play with Madness"), and worked my way back to "Run to the Hills" etc. As with most music, I haven't really tried too hard to keep up.
posted by elkevelvet at 3:41 PM on July 25, 2023

I've been working through this during my commutes, and each time a new album is discussed I pause to listen through that album before proceeding.

The experience is akin to having the world's greatest lover explain their process and technique, then demonstrate it, then laughingly say something like "I did that because I thought it was cool" as you're entangled in the bedsheets, gasping for more, confirming that yes Trent, that was definitely cool.

Well... for me anyway, your mileage may vary.
posted by Molesome at 1:12 AM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had queued this up to watch, but youtube is saying since yesterday that the channel has been terminated.
posted by mitabrev at 3:30 AM on July 27, 2023

They have a website but it’s not too useful, no episode pages for a start, but one of the feed links might take you to somewhere you can find the interview.
posted by Artw at 8:11 AM on July 28, 2023

This seems to be the interview. Not sure about the original as I also had this queued up but the orig. link is dead.
posted by eschatonizer at 2:22 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]